A little over a year ago, we posed ourselves that question. It was an interesting challenge – one of turning the problem that most local food distributors have on its head.

By now, most of us are aware that local food distribution has a glass ceiling – it’s about 70-80 deliveries per week where the admin burden really kicks in and stifles growth. [tweet this]

There’s just too much complexity to handle with spreadsheets and hacked together systems when you hit this number – you’re bound to start making errors – whether it’s making sure someone’s paid their bill, that one of the boxes should’ve had artichokes instead of carrots, or that Bob & Karen had just moved house. You know – that bit of information you scribbled on a sticky note and pinned to the wall?

So, the glass ceiling is really the automation of those labour intensive admin tasks – packing sheets, customer ledgers, delivery reconciliation and matching up payments. Take away that glass ceiling, and we know that many local food schemes can grow, get more quality & healthy food to people, and be more profitable. We know this from the handful of schemes who have invested heavily in their technology and grown accordingly.

Back to the question – how can we change the game? How can we get more local food distribution businesses operating, serving different markets & communities, providing more demand for small farms & artisan producers? How can we shift the needle on the destructive nature of industrialised food systems? How can we bring back the food webs that existed pre-industrial food distribution? Lets call that our vision of the Food Web 2.0.

The answer is not simple, but it’s the challenge that we took on. It’s the challenge that we have spent well over a year working on in various forms, and it’s the challenge that we’ve got our first solution to. Bucky Box is about bringing those tools to the masses, to the other 90% – to anyone who wants to start up a food distribution business [tweet], whether it’s 20 people in their local office, 200 people at their local church, or 2000 people in their community. Simple to use. Affordable. Ready to go.

We’ve got some exciting news in the pipeline to get a little bit of a buzz going around Local Food distribution, as we genuinely believe decentalising food distribution is one of the most exciting challenges & opportunities in c21st. <- [tweet].

It’s the forefront of enabling regenerative agriculture, improving the health of ourselves and our communities, and of lifting people around the world out of poverty. <- [tweet]

If you haven’t heard about SXSWEco, then you should take a moment and jump over to sxsweco.com – here’s the brief run down about what the event is about:

SXSW Eco is a three-day conference addressing the need for a concerted, cross sector approach to solving the recognized challenges facing the economy, the environment and civil society. In its second year, SXSW Eco will be held October 3rd-5th, 2012 at the AT&T Conference Center in Austin, Texas.

Hosting an international audience of on-the-ground innovators and executive level decision makers from the public and private sectors as well as thought leaders from academia, this event will drive the conversation of sustainability beyond rhetoric and towards solutions. SXSW Eco is for professionals at the forefront of the post-recognition discussion who are dedicated to making progress towards solving these challenges.

Join us in Austin, Texas for discovery, cutting-edge discussion and unique networking opportunities with experienced, passionate and pragmatic professionals.

We’ve recently have been asked a fair bit ‘who are you most excited about in the intersection between Food & Technology?’.

As you can probably tell, we get pretty excited about what we’re up to (well, you’d be worried if we weren’t!), but here’s our Top 5 ‘Stars of #FoodTech’ that we’re excited about at the moment (in no particular order):

Coined ‘the Linkedin for Local Food’, this awesome project is focused on facilitating the connections between diverse food enterprises, so they can find one another, talk, connect, and trade. You can create a free profile, then map your connections with suppliers & consumers in your area – showing the growing web of local food systems around the world.

Making meal sharing simple. How can we host better parties, more often & share the cost? Bringing ‘stone soup‘ into the internet era, Zokos enables us to come together more often over food, by taking the load off the hosts to pay for all the food and wine. Call it collaborative consumption for dinner parties, blended with Kickstarter?

According to WeFarm, the major barrier to Agricultural Innovation & Sustainability in developing nations around the world, is a lack of information. The internet has changed everything when it comes to access to information, but many small scale farmers in developing nations don’t have access to computers – that said, they do have access to mobile phones. WeFarm does the clever bit in the background, allowing greater collaboration & innovation amongst geographically diverse farmers around the world.

How do we bring about greater cross-sectoral collaboration, education & solutions? An intentional network of Local, Sustainable Businesses, around the world, which blends education (webinars & online courses) with offers & calls for help. Invite only at this stage (vetted for suitability), GroAction is already offering online courses in Urban Agriculture.

“Open Source Ecology is a network of farmers, engineers, and supporters that for the last two years has been creating the Global Village Construction Set, an open source, low-cost, high performance technological platform that allows for the easy, DIY fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a sustainable civilization with modern comforts. The GVCS lowers the barriers to entry intofarming, building, and manufacturing and can be seen as a life-size lego-like set of modular tools that can create entire economies, whether in rural Missouri, where the project was founded, in urban redevelopment, or in the developing world.”

Check out the animation here:

So there you go… our Top 5 Stars of #FoodTech as we stand. We’re excited!

Drop us a line if there’s anything you think we should be aware of. As our Global Partnership Fund grows, we will be looking for innovative partnerships with organisations such as these, who are playing vital roles in bringing about a better food system.

What a totally inspiring weekend I’ve just had in Auckland. A last minute decision to stay in town and go to see Elisabet Sahtouris speak, has turned into a full on learning experience which I’m really grateful for.

Image courtesy of Lexicon of Sustainability

Let’s take a step back – the last 50 or 60 years has been a pretty formative time here on Earth, with a couple of competing ideologies having diverged how various nations have approached creating prosperity for their citizens. I grew up in the ‘Western world’ which took a Capitalist approach to things. Undoubtedly there has been significant advancements in standard of living, and drastic shifts & innovation in many industries. Only now, however, is mass awareness emerging for how this value is being ‘created’ and at what cost.

From my understanding, it’s fair to say a lot of this prosperity has been borrowed from Earth & borrowed from our future. Capitalism has ramped up the Industrialised way of ‘manufacturing value’ over the last 50-60 years, which could be characterized as largely ‘extractive’ and linear in it’s approach to creating good & services; extract, process, trade, dispose. We’re now seeing around the world that this paradigm is not only unsustainable with a growing global population, but is in fact simply a race to the bottom.

began with the basic idea of regeneration of environmental, social & cultural capital, to create prosperity for People & Planet. It identified, of course, that people & planet are inseparable as we exist in a Living System, and therefore what’s good for the planet is also good for us.

How do we build businesses based on the fundamental needs of our global society rather than short term fads and wants? How do we ensure our businesses really create value (social, environmental, cultural & economic combined) rather than taking from the future generations? How do we build the future of business in the mold of mature ecosystems (cooperative & incredibly efficient) instead of pioneering ecosystems (competitive & wasteful)?

We’re going to be taking some great learnings away from this conference and seeing where we’re working well and where we can improve. We can already see there’s some good elements to our model, but we think we can do more, inspired by 3.8 billion years of evolution.

“No Business has ever faced a challenge that a Rainforest has not already created a solution for.”
~ Elisabet Sahtouris